25. Chapter 25 #2
I barely notice the polished steel, the dark wood paneling on just about everything.
I can barely hear over the sound of my own beating heart.
When the elevator doors open, I take several steps into the Cole Capital lobby and the receptionist looks up.
"Darcella Cole," I say, holding my briefcase with both hands now. "For Richard Cole. He'll see me."
She hesitates and picks up the phone.
Thirty seconds later—
"He'll see you now."
I snort. Because of course he will.
He is too arrogant to consider that I might be the one holding the cards.
That's always been his fatal flaw.
He taught me everything he knows.
He just never considered I'd use it against him.
Trust my father to look exactly the same as he did when I left.
The man’s fifty-eight years old and still wearing it like a man who believes age is something that happens to other people. Dark-haired—though his is from a bottle, not genetics—immaculate in a dark gray suit, the Biscayne Bay spread out behind him through wall-to-wall glass.
Same desk.
Same view.
Same man who taught me that love is transactional, that needing people is weakness, that the only difference between a predator and a victim is who moves first.
I sit down across from him without being invited to.
His expression morphs—first into surprise, then pleasure, then the particular calculation I spent my whole childhood trying to earn my way past.
"Darcella." His voice is warm. It's always warm. That's the thing about narcissists—they're extraordinary at warmth. "I've been hoping you'd come home."
"I'm not home," I say. "I'm here on business."
His hazel eye, nearly the same as mine, moves over me, assessing.
"You look well," he says.
"I know." I open my bag, removing the dossier, forty-three pages, tabbed, indexed, annotated in Jessica's even handwriting with my details filled in, and slide it across the desk. "I know everything, Dad."
He doesn't touch it. "I don't know what you think—"
"Thomas Shaw," I say. "Fifteen years of friendship you used as a weapon. The capital siphoning. The parallel firm. Cole Capital, RC Holdings, Cole Atlantic, the shell rotation. The debt acquisition in 2001. The federal investigation. The bankruptcy." I hold his gaze. "The heart attack."
Something moves across his face.
Not guilt.
My father doesn't do guilt.
But something.
Recalculation, maybe.
"The Shaw Group's lawyers have a copy," I continue. "And a journalist contact at the Miami Herald has an escrow file that goes live in seventy-two hours unless I send a specific code." I fold my hands on the desk. "The same way you would do it, Dad. I learned from the best."
A long silence fills the air-conditioned room, introducing a secondary chill.
Outside, Biscayne Bay glitters in the July heat.
A boat cuts across the water outside the windows as the city below hums.
"Darcella—"
"The Tulum deal is done," I say. "The competing bid failed.
Ricardo and Alexander are going to find that their local relationships in Mexico have become considerably less useful.
" I stand up. "And you're going to leave the Shaw Group alone.
All three brothers. The Tulum property. Everything they're building. "
"And if I don't?"
"Then the escrow file goes live. The lawyers file. And the trust you set up for me gets seized in discovery, which means I lose every cent of it." I pick up my bag. "I've thought about that. I'm at peace with it."
He stares at me.
And what I told Bria earlier was right. So right.
Because for the first time in my life, my father has nothing to say.
I spent twenty-four years waiting for this moment, waiting to stand up to the man who squeezed me into boxes my whole life, who made me feel small.
Less than.
And the victory is quieter than I expected.
Less fanfare.
More like setting something down that I didn't realize I was still carrying.
"I'm done letting you make me feel like needing people is weakness," I say.
"I came to New York thinking I had to do everything alone.
That asking for help was the same as being you, using people, owing people, the ledger you keep on everyone.
" I look at him across the desk. "It's not.
Letting people in isn't your version of transactional.
It's just human. And I'm done apologizing for being one. "
He doesn't respond.
I didn't expect him to.
I walk to the door.
"Darcella."
I stop but don’t turn around.
"The child," he says quietly. "You're carrying a Shaw."
The fact that he knows, that he has people who told him, doesn't surprise me.
It used to.
"Yes," I say. "I am."
"And Declan—"
“Already loves this baby more than you ever knew how to love me.” I open the door. "Goodbye, Dad."
I walk out, heading down the hallway, and into the elevator.
And somewhere between the fiftieth floor and the lobby, I start crying.
Not grief exactly.
Not relief either.
Somewhere in between—that particular feeling of a wound that has been open your entire life finally, finally beginning to close.
Jessica and Bria are on their feet the moment the elevator opens.
"Well?" Bria demands.
"It's done."
"Did he—"
"Have a heart attack? No. He had nothing to say."
Jessica exhales, running fingers through her honey-blonde hair. "Good. Thank God. I thought we might have to break you out of here like Escape from Alcatraz."
I snort, letting myself laugh. "No. At least not now. My father’s damaged and full of himself, but he’s not stupid. He might come after me someday."
My stare hardens at my best friends. "And if he ever does, I’ll be ready. I’m nobody’s victim." I swallow, shoulders straightening. "Not anymore."
Jessica smiles, then leans in to kiss my cheek. "Glad to hear it. Now…we need to get to the airport. Your flight is in ninety minutes."
“I’m very ready go.”
Bria takes one look at my face and hands me a granola bar from her bag.
"Eat," she says. "The baby needs fuel and you need to not pass out in a Cole Capital lobby."
"I'm not going to pass out."
"Eat the granola bar, Darcy."
I start eating and the three of us walk out into the Miami heat, a wall of humidity and sunlight, into the private car Jessica arranged.
I sit in the back between my two best friends, Bria putting her arm around me, Jessica staring out the window, already thinking three steps ahead the way she always does.
"I bet you were a beast up there," Bria says.
"I don't know about that."
"You walked into your father's office, slid a forty-three-page dossier across his desk, and watched him have nothing to say." She squeezes my shoulder. "That's beast mode."
I look out the window at Miami sliding past.
The bay. The palm trees. The billboards. The sprawling, gorgeous mess of a city that was my cage for all my life and is now just — a city.
Just a place.
Not a trap anymore.
And, finally, I let myself think about Declan.
About his face on the beach last night.
About the way he held my hand.
About the annulment deadline eight days from now.
My throat tightens.
"Hey," Bria says softly.
"I'm fine."
"You're allowed to not be fine."
"I know." I lean my head against her shoulder. "I'm fine though."
"The baby is going to be incredible," Jessica says, without turning from the window. "For what it's worth."
"Is that your version of comfort?"
"It's my version of fact." She glances at me. "Shaw genes." A pause that is as close to tender as Jessica gets in public. "It's going to be extraordinary."
I smile at her, something loosening inside my chest.
That is, until I realize we’ve passed the airport exit.
"Wait—" I sit up. "We missed the turn. The airport is—"
"I know where the airport is," the driver says pleasantly.
"Then why—"
"Darcy." Jessica is looking at her phone, not at me. "Just wait."
"Jessica—"
"Wait."
The car turns onto a smaller road, then through a gate.
Before I know it, we’re in a private airfield. It’s small, quiet, the sort used for charters and corporate jets, the Miami heat shimmering off the tarmac.
The car stops.
"What is this?"
"Get out," Bria says.
"Why are we at a—"
"Darcy. Get. Out. Of. The. Car."
I get out.
And there, standing on the tarmac next to the Shaw Group jet in the full, blinding July heat, in a suit that looks painted on his muscular frame, holding an armful of the exact same birds of paradise and white orchids that had been at Jessica's wedding—the ones I'd stood next to at the altar—is Declan Shaw.
He looks mildly ridiculous.
He also looks like everything.
My mind blanks, shocking emptying my body and brain of all thought, all reason.
I’m not dressed for this weather.
Buttoned up in a business navy number that hits my knees, I’m not equipped for walking in this sticky Floridian heat.
But I have no choice.